Crystal HD is the Broadcom's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. Crystal HD has been available as single chip high-definition advanced media processors BCM70012 and BCM70015; these chips are found on mini PCIe cards for purchase.
Contents
The BCM970012 supports hardware decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1, WMV9 and MPEG-2 and the BCM970015 additionally supports DivX 3.11, 4.1, 5.X, 6.X and Xvid. VP8, Daala and HEVC are not supported.
Broadcom Crystal HD is found in a couple of products, such as the Dell Inspiron, HP Slate 500 or ExoPC, ASUS Eee Keyboard.
Operating system support
The Crystal HD SIP core needs to be supported by the device driver, which provides one or more interfaces such as VDPAU, VAAPI or DXVA. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, for example VLC media player or GStreamer, to access the PureVideo hardware and make use of it.
Linux
Broadcom has published a device driver for Linux under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. Broadcom also published application and library source code on a royalty-free basis under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1
Crystal HD can be accessed through the Video Acceleration API interface. There is a GStreamer plugin available.
There is e.g. support for Broadcom Crystal HD ASIC available in FFmpeg and MPlayer.
Microsoft Windows
Broadcom has published a device driver for Microsoft Windows
By default driver scaling to 1280x720 is enabled for higher resolutions, to disable this limitation the following key must be added to Windows Registry in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SOFTWARE Broadcom MediaPC CrystalHD] :
"DilScalingDisable" = dword: 00000001